I don’t mean “ecology” in that you study the environment separate from where we live or who we are as people. Actually, ecology, the way I think of it—the way I’ve been taught to think about it—is: paying attention to the webs of relationships that you are enmeshed in, depending on where you live. So, those are all the things that give us life, all the things that we depend on, as well as all the other entities that we relate to, including human beings.”
Dwayne Donald, “On What Terms Can We Speak? Lecture at the University of Lethbridge,” 2010
I initiated and led the curatorial process for developing this programme of artist commissions and events in 2022-2023, which took its direction from the Dwayne Donald quote above. The programme’s purpose was to consider what creative and collaborative methodologies can bring to the study of ecology and the environment. How can artistic practices pay attention to the complex challenges facing the world’s habitats and ecosystems in ways which do not perpetuate the logics and power imbalances which contributed to our current situation, instead fostering pluralism and collaboration?
The title was drawn from Canadian philosopher Lorraine Code, whose book Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location argues for expanded ways of knowing “sensitive to human and historical-geographical diversity and well equipped to interrogate and unsettle the instrumental rationality, abstract individualism, reductionism, and exploitation of people and places that the epistemologies of mastery have helped to create.”
The intention of the programme was to critically interrogate the tools with which we study ecology and the environment and consider what creative methods may offer in the quest to open up fairer futures for the world's human and nonhuman inhabitants. Can creative and collaborative approaches help us to grasp and interrogate the webs, in Dwayne Donald’s phrase, which connect lives, actions and histories at a local level to their global reverberations?
Commissioned artists were:
Libita Sibungu, whose Cornwall-based project brought together archival research, geology and deep time, explored through field recording and sound.
FRAUD used their project to explore the collective regional land management practice of fallows farming, leading a rural walking tour with introductions from farming practitioners.
Aliansyah Caniago’s artistic research investigated the disappearance of the Camphor tree in his native Sumatra, the oil of which was once a prized colonial export.
Laura Harrington used her residency to reprise an existing project, a collaboration with composer Kaffe Matthews, which used sonification as a basis for musical composition, performed by school children, reflecting declining wild salmon in the Tyne river.
Angela YT Chan, inspired by Arjun Appadurai’s ‘right to research’ concept, led craft workshops designed to aid participants in tracking their emotional state in relation to climate change.
Nastassja Simensky created a photo essay examining materiality, memory and loss in post-industrial landscapes.